Recently and not in association with any system changes, atril and xpdf
no longer displays the content of perhaps half my PDF files. They see
all the pages, but they are blank. An exception is that sometimes a
cover page, TOC, download notice at bottom of pages, or the graphics are
displayed, but not the text. This is consistent: a failure or success
repeats on subsequent tries.

This happens whether the PDF is version 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6. It happens
on my desktop machine whether using atril or xpdf. It does not happen if
I copy a problematic PDF to USB key and display it with xpdf on a laptop
that has the same version of Devuan Jessie, kernel and xpdf. However,
that same file on key fails to be displayed by my desktop machine.

The desktop has auto-upgrades, but not the laptop. However both machines
running Devuan Jessie with 3.16.0-4-amd64, The version of xpdf the same
on both desktop and laptop.

I've got 32 Gb RAM on this machine and no other PDFs are being
displayed. I tried to reboot to clean things out, but that didn't help.

The xpdf Find utility can find words in the body of a text, but displays
them only as black rectangle. So the problem seems to be the display of
the font.

    $ xpdf -fg black Abrams1995.pdf
    error: "black" file not found

Printing the PDF has same result as its display.



Haines Brown